I cannot deny that among the many regrets of my life is that of not completing my formal education. I am quite sure that I could have lost myself as an academic, not in the sense of escaping my past but perhaps of pushing beyond it by way of scholarly achievement. Even as I write this, however, I doubt its truth, for one is forever inextricably linked to his past. Any “pushing beyond” is only fleeting. Always he must be ensnared and dragged back by the insidious tentacles of memory.
The idea of a college education, however, consumed only a very small portion of my thoughts during that hour. My mind was awhirl with the revelation that my grandfather was at last reaping his well-earned harvest. Before I reached the place where I had parked Mrs. DuBois’ car, I knew that I must go to Marshland. As I drove from Urbana back to Monticello, I began to lay my plans for the upcoming journey to New York, a journey that, at the time, seemed to me imperative. I nevertheless felt a brewing uneasiness at the thought of looking once more upon my grandfather’s face. What purpose would be served by doing so? Would it not be safer and wiser to keep my distance?
I cannot explain why I felt impelled to travel to Marshland. I would not like to think that I wanted to see for myself that my grandfather had at last been made to suffer for his sins upon me, but I can think of no other reason that I should wish to see the man who had destroyed my innocence and had plunged me into hell. Indeed, I must be honest; to say that “I cannot explain why I felt impelled to travel to Marshland” is dissemblance, to put it gently—or falsehood, to state it frankly.
Thus it was that I found myself five days later, in June of 1973, making my way slowly yet inexorably toward the front door of my grandparents’ house. I had told Mrs. DuBois that a family emergency necessitated a hasty journey eastward, that I had been summoned quite unexpectedly. In the strictest sense, I suppose my words held some grain of truth.
I have read of the returning of victims to the scenes of their misfortunes as a stepping-stone to restoration. Facing one’s persecutor and revisiting the venue of crime are said by some to be essential components of emotional healing. I was not concerned with healing at this time, however, at least not consciously. Whether one can be unconsciously working out a means of healing I do not know. I know only that my desire in the summer of 1973 was to see with my eyes the physical wreckage of my grandfather.
And this I did. I had not counted on double vengeance, for I saw not only my grandfather, wasted to a shell of suffering, but also my grandmother, teetering on the rim of insanity. A licensed practical nurse had been employed to care for them; she came for eight hours each day. It is a marvel to me now that my grandmother had labored so arduously to follow the nurse’s instructions for the dispensing of medication during the night, for my grandfather’s bed care, and so forth—it must have taken unimaginable effort—when ending his life, and her own, might have been so easy for her to accomplish. Whether the thought never crossed her mind or whether her scruples would not allow such speedy delivery, I shall never know.
By my reckoning, my grandfather was at this time around eighty years of age. I wondered, as I gazed upon him for the first time in more than twelve years, what name to put to my feelings for this man, once so strong and hardy, now eaten from within by cancer. It was not pity, yet it was not the hatred that I had so long nurtured. I had no word for what I felt.
My arrival was fortuitously—if such a word may be used in such a circumstance—timed, for my grandfather could still recognize faces and speak intelligibly, though only in weak gasps. A week later he had lost these powers. The first words that he spoke when I stood above his bed that day were these: “Is it you, Margaret? Is it?” And when I affirmed that it was, he closed his eyes and cried out hoarsely in anguished tones, “Oh, Margaret, forgive me.”
I did not reply, and the nurse, whose face went slack with incredulity, suggested that I let him rest. I turned to leave, but he opened his eyes and cried out again, reaching toward me with one hand. I could not bear the thought of his skeletal hand upon mine and did not step nearer. “Will you…will you forgive me, Margaret?” he gasped. But I did not answer. My grandmother, hunched in fright outside the bedroom door, fled from me as I exited, casting fearful glances at me over her shoulder and pronouncing curious curses, or so I supposed they were, upon me. “The devil and beast!” she said. “The seven vials of wrath poured out…the harlot of Babylon!”
I stayed in my grandparents’ house for almost three months. My grandfather died one morning between midnight and six o’clock ten days after my arrival. My grandmother awakened me by pounding and shouting upon the door of the bedroom where I slept. I could not distinguish her words, but I guessed their import. A week later, three days after my grandfather’s funeral, she, too, was dead. In September I boarded a Greyhound bus and journeyed from New York to Filbert, South Carolina, having chosen it at random from an atlas, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter.
This, then, is the foundation upon which Thomas let fall his well-intended words on Thanksgiving Day concerning choices, forgiveness, and the like. In reporting what happened to me these many years ago, I have aimed at a neutral tone. It strikes me now, however, that I may have erred in the including of so many details concerning my grandfather’s death. Perhaps I have imposed upon my narrative an emotional heaviness. I cannot recall what I felt upon his death and that of my grandmother’s only days later. It certainly was not sadness, nor was it relief. Again, I have no word for what I felt. Perhaps if the truth be known, I felt nothing. I read recently the words of Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, in his book All Rivers Run to the Sea. He explained why he could not cry when his father died at the hands of the Nazis at Buchenwald: “I had taken leave of myself.” I understood what he meant, for this had also happened to me many years ago when I had closed my heart.
This, then, is another chapter, to put it tritely, in the life of the woman named Margaret Bryce Tuttle, upon whom Birdie Freeman, many years later, began administering the ointment of her kindness. She came into my life bearing a little oil in a cruse and set about quietly sprinkling it upon me, then rubbing it gently. And like the widow of Zarephath, her oil was never depleted; rather, it appeared to replenish itself daily.
Returning to my grandparents’ house had wrought no healing; indeed, it had likely opened my wounds anew. I certainly felt no sense of closure upon my misery, for I had seen, like the speaker in William Blake’s poem “The Poison Tree,” my own moral perversion in viewing the ruin of those who had done me harm.
22
A Table in the Wilderness
The summer days are passing more swiftly than my story is progressing. Already it is July 15. I cannot consider my life of a year ago, before the advent of Birdie Freeman, without great wonder at the many changes that have taken place. Even now, during this summer of recollection, I am seeing more changes. Last week, for instance, Thomas and I impulsively set off on a day trip to Hampton, north of Charleston, something that we had never before done. I will speak more of this later.
I made the journey to Marshland, then, and saw what I went to see. It is a strange irony to me that though I witnessed the death of my tormentor, his stranglehold on me did not diminish. The moderate sum of money to which I fell heir in no way mitigated my anger. I was still gripped by bitter memories, and futile regrets preyed upon me.
But enough of regrets, at least of mine. Birdie Freeman had regrets of her own, two of which I came to know shortly before what I have labeled “The Beginning of Our Friendship.” This turning point occurred in December of last year. I shall continue my progress toward it by resuming my earlier narrative.
On the Friday after Thanksgiving Birdie and I were not yet truly friends, not even after Thomas and I spent four hours that evening with Mickey and her in their home beside the Shepherd’s Valley Cemetery. School was not in session on that Friday, but Birdie had told me on the previous Tuesday that she would be happy to continue our piano lessons uninterrupted if I would drive to her house
on Friday.
By now I had finished the entire Music Tree series and was making my way through a book from the Frances Clark Library for Piano Students called An Introduction to Piano Literature, which included a number of folk songs and singing games such as “Clapping Song,” “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” “A-Hunting We Will Go,” and the like. After this I was to move to the second book in the series, which contained a selection of short pieces by master composers—simple minuets by Bach and Mozart, dances by Haydn, a sonatina by Beethoven, and a march by Schumann. I practiced diligently each afternoon, for I was most eager to advance to this book, as well as to a companion volume of short pieces by contemporary composers such as Bartok and Kabalevsky.
At noon on that Friday the telephone rang. Thomas answered it, for I was working in the kitchen. I had just prepared a gelatin salad for that night and was setting it in the refrigerator. This is another way in which Thomas is still a young boy. He likes Jell-O, chocolate pudding, and peanut butter sandwiches.
From the tone of Thomas’s voice and his playful ripostes, I believed the caller to be Norman Lang at the hardware store. Thomas had planned not to open his vacuum repair shop for the day, but I supposed that a customer had appeared, claiming to need immediate service, and knowing Thomas’s inability to refuse a request for help, I expected him to be on his way to the store within minutes.
I was greatly surprised, therefore, to hear him say, “Yep, she sure is. She’s right in here in the kitchen just bustlin’ around busy as can be. Well, actually, she’s stooped down in front of the icebox right now. Just a second and I’ll get her on the phone for you.” He stepped toward me, extending the receiver and stretching the telephone cord from the hallway off the living room. “Here ya go, Rosie. It’s for you.” I could not imagine why Norman Lang should want to speak with me. I moved through the kitchen doorway to relax the taut cord.
“This is Margaret speaking,” I said. I heard Thomas step out the back door to the washing machine, which had just begun to thump clamorously—its signal that the weight of the clothes was unevenly distributed or “out of whack,” as Thomas called it.
And then instead of Norman Lang’s voice, I heard Birdie’s. “That husband of yours is the biggest tease,” she said. “I couldn’t stop laughing!” To illustrate her point, she broke off to laugh breathlessly, apparently remembering something foolish he had said. I did not reply, and she soon stopped laughing and stated her business. “I was just thinking,” she said. “Why don’t you and Thomas come over around five o’clock this afternoon? You can have your piano lesson then, and after that you and Thomas could stay and eat supper with us.”
I objected to the thought of our husbands’ presence at my piano lesson, and I said so.
“Oh no, they wouldn’t be up here with us,” Birdie said. “Mickey’s going to take Thomas downstairs to the basement and show him his workshop and all his little trinkets and things. They won’t bother us one bit. The fact is, they won’t even be able to hear us down there.” Thomas returned to the kitchen, and I heard a brief gush of water from the sink faucet.
I paused. Birdie’s plan did not suit me, yet I did not care to voice my protest within Thomas’s earshot.
“I’m not going to go to a lot of trouble for supper,” Birdie added, as if this additional information might win me over.
“I have just made a gelatin salad for our supper tonight,” I said. I meant this as an introduction for the declining of her invitation.
As in past instances, however, she misunderstood my meaning. “Oh, that’ll be fine!” she said brightly. “Bring it along! I was going to have ham and macaroni and cheese. A Jell-O salad will be just the thing!”
I wondered in the brief moment that followed whether she had intentionally turned my words, whether she did so regularly, reading their true meaning but quickly manipulating them to her purpose. Was Birdie Freeman capable, I wondered, of manipulation? Or was she so guileless that she attributed to the speech of others her own innocent motives? Was her blindness due to deficiency or design? Could it be that she chose to think only the best of others, or was it an unconscious act?
Even as I pondered these questions, I heard myself say, though somewhat flatly, in a tone of resignation, “I will bring corn bread also.”
Like our dinner at the Field Pea, the evening at Birdie and Mickey’s home does not remain in my memory as a neatly sequenced occasion. I cannot understand why this is so, for it seems that such out-of-the-ordinary experiences should be recalled with great clarity of detail, in thorough and well-ordered outline form, rather than as a vast honeycomb of disparate images. For aside from the occasional one-day family reunions with Thomas’s relatives in North Carolina, we had not been invited to someone’s home for supper during the entire fifteen years of our marriage. Likewise, we never invited guests to our home.
The evening with Birdie and Mickey consisted of a variety of activities, my piano lesson occurring at the outset, followed at some point by the meal, which we took in the kitchen at a white enamel table such as those associated with Depression-era diners. The chairs, though similar in style, were unmatched. They were all painted glossy black, however.
Birdie was a proficient cook, though her dishes were unpretentious. Besides ham, macaroni and cheese, gelatin salad, and corn bread, our supper also included speckled butter beans, baked squash, iced tea, and a custard pie. Birdie informed us that Mickey had made the piecrust. He had learned the art early in their marriage and by now “could do it blindfolded,” Birdie told us fondly. We did not eat the pie, however, immediately following the meal but rather waited, as Mickey put it, “for the sediment to settle.” Birdie praised my corn bread and gelatin salad, declaring them to be “the finishing touches” to the meal, and at great length she admired the serving dish that held the gelatin.
Before leaving home, I had transferred the salad from its mold into a large round ceramic dish with a lid, which was actually intended as a vegetable casserole, so that it could be easily transported. Though the full effect of the molded design could not be seen, concealed as it was within an enclosed dish, I preferred this arrangement to the prospect of an accident such as the one Francine had reported at work one day several years ago.
En route to her mother’s apartment for supper one night, Francine had swerved suddenly to miss an animal—“I think it was a dog,” she had said, “but it sure was movin’ slow, and Watts and Gala both said it looked to them like a raccoon”—and the cherry Jell-O salad that Champ was holding in his lap had slid right off the plate onto the front seat of the car. “It scooted across the seat like it was waxed,” Francine had said, “and it landed right smack up against me.” She had acted out the rest of the story, balancing her bulk upon one of the kitchen stools, her hands clutching an imaginary steering wheel. “When I looked down and saw that big red quivering blob of I-didn’t-know-what up aside of me, I screamed. It looked like a blood clot! All I heard was Champ yellin’, ‘I didn’t do it, Mama! I didn’t do it!’ Anyway, I jerked that steering wheel so hard the other way that we left the road and plowed through a bob-wire fence, then took off across that piece of farmland out there past the Sunny Dale Feed and Seed. By the time it was over, the ones of us that wasn’t screaming was crying.” At the telling of it, of course, she was laughing and gasping for air as if floridly maniacal, and she ended the tale with her customary summation: “That was sure something else!”
“What’s that pattern called?” Birdie asked now, gesturing toward the serving dish.
“I believe the name printed on the bottom of the dish is Morning Glory,” I said.
“Well, it’s just beautiful,” she said, then asked, “Do you have a whole set of dishes like that?”
“No.”
“She oughta,” Thomas said. “I keep tellin’ her we need us a new set. Those old white ones we got has missin’ pieces and some of ’em’s chipped. They—”
“They do not seem to affect your appetite,” I said.
&nb
sp; Mickey laughed and pointed a finger at Thomas as if shooting a gun. “She got you!” he cried. To me he said, “I know what you’re saying, Margaret. I don’t like to spend money on things like that, either. It’s the same with our silverware here. See, they don’t all quite match, but they’re decent and clean—well, at least they were.” He held up his knife, which was coated with butter and corn bread crumbs.
Birdie had lifted the gelatin dish above her head and was looking at its underside. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this pattern in the stores,” she said.
“They probably don’t carry it at Wal-Mart, puddin’,” Mickey said.
“Oh, stop it,” she said, laughing. “I don’t do all my shopping there, and you know it.”
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot,” Mickey said. “You go to Big Lots, too.”
“I told you to behave tonight,” she told him. Setting the dish down, she leaned forward and addressed Thomas, tilting her face up at him. “I think it’s real sweet of you to want to get Margaret a new set of dishes.” She smiled approvingly.
“I’m kinda afraid to,” Thomas said, winking at me. “She might throw ’em at me, one at a time.” He never would have spoken to me in this manner a month ago, I thought, and I could not recall his ever winking at me before.
I recount this portion of our dinner conversation only because it touches upon what happened later, in December, at the metamorphosis of my relationship with Birdie from acquaintance to friendship.
At some point during the evening all four of us descended to the basement. Since my years in Marshland, I have always felt unsettled in basement rooms. I once rented a basement apartment in Vincennes, Indiana, but moved after only three days, forfeiting a month’s rent. I have no doubt as to the source of my unease concerning basements. Had Mickey and Birdie Freeman had a darkroom in their basement, I may very well have become physically ill. Birdie and Mickey’s basement, however, was full of light and color. It would most likely be possible for the average person to forget that he was in a basement.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 30
